In latos n2 I saw a wierd sort of black framework that looked like giant rectangular holes in the background of the sector. They disappeared when I jumped out and back in again, but it was like two giant black frames around the 'edges' of the sector. I have a few screenshots, at:

http://www.getink.net/temp/wierd1.png
http://www.getink.net/temp/wierd2.png
http://www.getink.net/temp/wierd3.png

I get that too! Heavy IO or bad lag during sector load causes that for me.
(sometimes I even get them after switching virtual desktops)

You're using Linux, right?

It's a bug (or an overzealous optimization) of the nvidia drivers. Easily duplicated by partially obscuring the Vendetta window (by putting an xterm in front of it or something) during loading. When Vendetta renders the background textures to the so-called background buffer, the parts obscured in the front buffer are not rendered in the background buffer, so you get holes in the background images.

In this case, actually, it sounds like it didn't finish rendering before it copied the buffer to a texture. That's odd.

I get that sometimes. nvidia drivers on linux are just funky in general.

If any of you are using the 70series of nvidia's drivers, Id advise reverting back to the 60series, the 70s still have "issues" much like the 60s did at first.

I had something like that...

Well gosh darnnit I can't find my screenshot of it, but there was this one time I logged on and outside a station (either Sedina L2 or Latos N15) there was what looked like a purple nebulae as part of the background. I turned my graphics settings down and then up again, and when I did that it was gone (gone as soon as I lowered them, and didn't come back)

Yeah, I'm using Linux, but it's an ATI card and I was running full screen mode (not switching desktops or changing focus). I don't like to use nvidia cards in linux because you never know when you are going to come up with some bizarre behavior like that. You also sometimes end up with mx4000 style bugs which suck even worse :(